EMANCIPATION MANIFESTO 1861

ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY MORE YEARS?

150 years ago today on 3rd March 1861, Tzar Alexander II of Russian issued the Emancipation Manifesto. It proclaimed the emancipation of the serfs on private estates and of domestic, household, serfs. By this edict more than 23 million people received their liberty. Serfs were granted the full rights of free citizens, gaining the rights to marry without having to gain consent, to own property and to own a business. The Manifesto prescribed that peasants would be able to buy the land from the landlords. Household serfs gained their freedom, but no land. This did not mean emancipation took place overnight throughout the whole of the Russian empire, nor were the terms by which they were granted their freedom advantageous throughout the land; but, it was the beginning of important liberal reforms.

The reforms were engineered by a number of liberal politicians, three of whom in particular were behind the manifesto. Nikolay Miyutin, Alexei Strol'man and Yakov Rostovtsey.

Nikolay Miyutin

Indeed, Miyutin is remembered as the chief architect of the reforms undertaken during Alexander II's reign, including the manifesto and the establishment of the zemstvo, which was a form of local government. These bodies were created in 1864, one for each district and another for each province or government. They consisted of a representative council and of an executive board nominated by the members of the council. The board consisted of five classes of members. Large land proprietors (Usually nobles owning 590 acres and over) who sit in person; delegates of the small landowners, including the clergy in their capacity of landed proprietors; delegates of the wealthier townsmen; delegates of the less wealthy urban class; and delegates of the peasants , elected by the volosts (a cooperative or group of local peasants).

I'm not sure how effective these reforms were in creating any sort of constitutional monarchy or semblance of a democratic society under the rule of law, but the attempt to create it was there. In any event, Alexander II was assassinated on the 13the March 1881, just 20 years later, in St. Petersburg. His son Alexander III succeeded him, and was a very different ruler altogether.

Unlike his father is was considered to be a repressive and reactionary tzar. Antisemitic and anti-reformist, the appalling legacy he left his son Nicholas II was largely responsible for the discontent that led the the revolution.

Meanwhile in 1861, on the other side of the world, while Alexander II was organising freedom for the serfs, the American Civil War, to allegedly free the slaves, was brewing. Liberty and justice for all was about to get a hearing, at least in the form of a pledge. Whether that pledge is ever fulfilled is another question. 150 years have elapsed and the ring and cry of freedom is sweeping across North Africa into Asia. Will it ever happen ?